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Terms We Use
This post is part of the Brand Messaging for Startups Framework, an open-source marketing project. Contributions are welcome :)
Imagine you’re introducing two friends. Samantha is an avid runner who does social media for a nature conservancy. Alex is also an avid runner and CEO of a rapidly growing tech company. If you say, “Samantha, meet Alex, she’s the CEO at ABC Company.” You chose to describe Alex by the term “CEO” and in doing that you started a needlessly weird conversation, leaving both parties to stumble around until they find their common ground.
The terms you use to describe your business serve the same purpose, they put a stake in the ground around where a conversation begins. Choosing the right terms makes an in immediate mental match with your audience, creating an effortless starting point for your conversation with them.
In this post I’m going to walk you through a step-by-step process to choosing the right terms to describe your tech company.
Why Tech Companies Get Their Terms Wrong
At RJMetrics, we struggled with our terms for years. We had an aversion to calling ourselves a “business intelligence” tool. As a category, we felt that business intelligence was overly focused on data visualization compared to the equally important component of data consolidation. So we described ourselves as “a tool to help businesses make data-driven decisions.” Trouble was, no one was out shopping for a “a…
